LIES OF THE FLESH
by Steven Savile


THE WIND-BLASTED moor rolled out before them, rich with the muted shades of heather and gorse, and speckled with white blossoms. A low, scuttling wind whipped across the tips of the vegetation, bullying the dwarfs as they trudged through the boggy peat. The earth had a peculiar acidic smell that stung Skargrim's nostrils and burned the back of his throat as he inhaled. The sun smouldered low in the sky, setting on the Ostermark.
Skargrim ducked his head down until his chin pressed against the chainmail on his chest and struggled on, his boots sinking up to the ankles in the black peat. Few crops could flourish in such a rich bed. It needed to be cut into stonier land, to nourish it. The world was funny like that: too much of a good thing was as poisonous as too little, and just as capable of killing the things it cared for.
The wind picked up, swirling around the dwarfs, forcing them to draw their cloaks tighter around their shoulders. It goaded them on deeper and deeper into the moor. Twice Kragar stumbled, his foot sinking into a hidden pothole. Both times he needed the butt of his hammer to heave himself out of the mire. The rune-priest, Thorbad, was no more certain on his feet.
The wind carried strange sounds with it. It folded them in on themselves, joining them together, like voices of the dead buried deep beneath the peat. The ghostly keening rose into an elegiac lament.
Skargrim shuddered and pulled his cloak closer around his shoulders. Once dusk reclaimed the sky, navigating the moor would go from difficult to dangerous.
As they crested the next low rise, Skargrim saw rooftops: a human settlement. A trick of perspective and failing light made it look as though the smoke emanated from the canted roofs. It didn't. Strips of peat had been cut and dried, laid out at the mouth of the small hamlet and set alight. He counted four pyres.
'Why the fires?' Thorbad wondered, coming up to stand beside him.

A CROOK-BACKED farmer stabbed a pitchfork into the rectangular sods of peat, throwing three more onto the fire. He leaned back, foot resting above the iron tines, and wiped the sweat from his brow. He had an open face, cragged with the wrinkles of time and hard work. His eyes were dark, ringed with fatigue. He saw the three dwarfs and stopped what he was doing to study them suspiciously. His frank appraisal verged on rudeness. 'Evening,' Kragar said.
'Aye,' the farmer agreed, 'that's what they call it when the sun goes down. Not often we see your kind round these parts.'
'Our kind?'
'Aye, your kind, dwarfs.'
'We are on our way back home, to the mountains,' Thorbad told him. 'Is there an inn here, where we can stay the night?'
The farmer grunted and gestured towards a building at the far side of what Skargrim presumed was the village green. There was a well in the centre, the grass around it worn down in tracks leading off to each of the cardinals. A thin-faced woman sat on a bench beneath the only tree, darning a patch onto a threadbare quilt. The branches hung low, as though weeping. She was lost in what she was doing. On the far side of the green two men straggled with a heavy wooden shutter, driving black iron nails into the timber frame of the window to hold it in place.
They left the farmer stoking the peat fire and headed towards the inn.
The battered wooden inn sign creaked and sighed as it rocked softly in the breeze. The steady chime of the hammer rang out in counterpoint to the noise. Eight of the ten houses facing onto the green had new shutters nailed across their windows. The last house on the left had older shutters that bore deep score marks and looked close to splitting along the grain where the wood hadn't been seasoned properly. Typical, Skargrim thought. Humans were always in a hurry to get things done and never took the time needed to do them right.
All eyes turned on the dwarfs as they crossed the green.
'Friendly place,' Thorbad muttered.
Skargrim nodded. It was not the most welcome homestead he had been in, not that he had spent a lot of time in the company of the short-lived ones.
'Notice anything peculiar?'
The four peat fires burned to the north, south, east and west, each tended by an equally dour-faced farmer.
It took him a moment to see what had caught Thorbad's eye. The heads of the nails resembled the sign of the Man-God, and the black iron handle of the well had been fashioned in the image of his hammer. There were more instances of religious fervor on display, including a small shrine to Shallya with a single burning candle set into the well wall. Copper and tin coins had been left as offerings. Not all of the observances were to the Man-God, or the more enlightened pantheon of deities, either. It always amused the dwarf how readily the manlings shifted their allegiance to whatever crude beliefs they thought would help them, especially in backwaters like this place, where the old ways still bubbled just beneath the surface of the collective conscience. Skargrim saw strange fetishes hanging above the doorway of one of the homes. He had mistaken the cluster of feathers for a dead bird, but on closer inspection he saw that it was more than just the evening's meal being bled. It was an elaborate construction of feather and bone, but of no creature that had ever lived. The bones of chicken, dog and sparrow had been stuffed up with feathers from at least a dozen different birds to fashion the fetish. The feet had been removed and stuffed with a pungent salve no doubt meant to ward off some unseen evil.
'Superstitious lot,' he said.
Thorbad nodded.
The hamlet was larger than it had at first appeared. The ground sloped away, and the more distant rooftops had originally been hidden from view. Skargrim could just make out the weathervane above the canted rooftop of the blacksmith's. The doors of the smithy were open, an inviting, lambent red glowing within. No doubt the smith was fashioning more sacred nails.
To the dwarfs, the village felt odd, even for a human settlement.

TWO OLD MEN sat on stools in the corner of the inn, hunched over a game of chance. Another sat at the bar nursing an empty tankard in his thick, grime-stained fingers. A serving girl bustled through the room, four tankards balanced in her hands for the long table at the other side of the room.
There was none of the banter the dwarf associated with tap rooms, serving wenches and drunken young men. The girl placed a foamy tankard before each of the drinkers and disappeared back into the kitchen without so much as a word.
The last man sat alone beside the fire, smoking a briar-wood pipe. He was a gaunt soul with the waxy complexion of the terminally ill. His head was shaved, a blue-grey tattoo that looked almost like an hourglass inked across his brow and the ridge of his nose. He watched the dwarfs intently without seeming to watch them at all.
The barkeep looked up from wiping out a pewter pitcher with a rag. He hawked a wad of weed into the spittoon beneath the bar and placed the tankard down on the pitted wooden surface. He glared at the dwarfs for a while, then finally said, 'You want something?'
'Ale, manling, three mugs,' Kragar said, stamping the stiffness out of his feet. Skargrim looked around the tap room, found a table that suited, and sat. The place reeked of unwashed bodies, peat, piss, and poor ale... very poor ale.
Kragar took half a mouthful and spat it out in a spume, cursing. He slammed the tankard down on the table and shook his head, wondering how to cleanse his tongue of the insipid brew. 'What in Bugman's name is this swill?' he muttered. 'Do humans have no idea what a decent pint's supposed to taste like?'
Before the hapless Kragar could vent his distaste openly, a young girl, no more than eight or nine years old, came charging down the narrow flight of wooden stairs. She threw herself into the barkeep's arms, smothering him with kisses.
'Night, night, princess,' the barkeep said, setting her down on the ground with an indulgent smile.
She blew him another kiss from the bottom step before disappearing back upstairs again.
'She's a whirlwind, that one. Never stops for a minute. Takes after her mother,' the man said, indulgently.
Kragar grunted.
One by one and two by two the other drinkers slowly departed, but the night was still young. In fact, it was barely night at all. Soon the dwarfs were alone in the tap room, save for the pipe smoker still warming himself by the fire.
Thorbad looked up from his brew, his face troubled.
'What is it?'
'Nothing,' the runepriest said, scowling.
'What do you mean nothing?'
'Nothing, that's it.'
Skargrim chuckled mirthlessly. 'Which in itself suggests something is amiss in that warped thing that passes for your brain?'
'Precisely,' the runepriest grunted. 'Something's not right here but I'm damned if I can put my finger on it.'
'This is a human village. It's not our problem.'
The sound of bolts slamming home and the timber brace dropping into place on the main door punctuated Kragar's words. The dwarf turned to see the barkeep brushing off his hands.
'Early to be closing isn't it?' asked Skargrim, surprised. No love of the finer things. The brew was rancid and folk hardly gregarious. With the exception of the barkeep and his daughter, no one had said a word to them since they had trudged into town.
'We're done for the night. Folks tend to keep to themselves after dark,' the barkeep said, heading back to the bar. 'Your room is at the top of the stairs. And no stealing any ale while I'm gone.' He balled up his rag and dropped it on the bar.
'As if we'd want any more of that piss water,' Kragar muttered.
The barkeep turned to the old man dozing by the fire. 'We're closing, Iago.'
The man looked up, deep blue eyes piercing the atmosphere, and shook his head slowly. He tapped out the contents of his pipe and refilled it with fresh smoke, drawing slowly on the briarwood. He closed his eyes, seeming to go back to sleep, cradling the pipe in his lap as though he cherished its small heat. He didn't draw on it again, just held it, content to breathe in the subtle aroma of leaf and wood through his nose.
Halfway up the stairs the barkeep turned, almost as an afterthought, and called back down to them, 'Best not to venture out now. The moors can be dangerous after dark.' With that, he disappeared upstairs, his heavy footsteps creaking along the landing. A moment later a door groaned slowly open, and then closed, settling heavily into its frame.
The dwarfs looked at each other, then at the mugs on the table between them.
'Much as it kills me to say it, I can't drink another drop.'
'I never thought I'd hear such words pass your lips, Kragar.'

THEIR ROOM WAS full of the creaks and groans of the building settling around them.
Skargrim tossed and turned restlessly. Beside him Kragar snored. His tongue rattled against his palate, causing his breath to whistle between the gap in his front teeth.
The moon was a bright silver sickle in the sky, hanging over the dark moors like a scythe.
Thorbad jabbed Kragar in the ribs. He opened his eyes, grunted, and rolled over dismissively, pulling the moth-eaten blanket with him. Within a few minutes he was snoring again, louder than before.
Skargrim gave up trying to sleep. He watched the shadow shapes on the wall as they ghosted over the seasoned timbers and whitewashed plaster. Three narrow cots had been crammed into the gabled room, the heads pressed up underneath the low sloping ceiling, the pillow feathers crushed flat and limp. Mould stained the ceiling blue in cracked patches. It smelled rank, like cheese turned sour.
A scattering of gravel hit the high window.
It took Skargrim a moment to realise what the noise was. He sat up in his cot, almost banging his head on the low ceiling. It came again, like hard rain. He clambered out of bed, went over to the window, and slowly lifted the latch. He strained to see out through the glass but couldn't, so he pushed the window open.
The first thing that hit him was the stench. He hadn't noticed it before with the peat burning. The village reeked of decay, the smell clinging to the wind like a death shroud: putrescence.
He scanned the shadows, looking for something: a movement, a flutter, a shuffle where there should have been stillness. The shadows were unforgiving, the sickle moon threw them into dim relief. Skargrim stared across them. Then, the man moved: a cadaverous figure wrapped in a cloak, utterly at home in the darkest places of the night. He lifted a white hand and beckoned the dwarf down to join him before melding back into the anonymity of the dark.
'This place reeks,' Skargrim muttered, closing the window.
Thorbad cracked his neck bones and rolled out of his narrow cot, his face grim. 'Nothing good ever comes of sneaking about in the shadows.'
Kragar grunted and knuckled his eyes, his face screwed up as though it had been hammered by a steel gauntlet. 'Can't you pair see I'm asleep?'

WHEN THEY CAME back downstairs, the bar was empty. Iago had gone.
The stairs creaked and groaned loudly in the silence. Skargrim crossed the taproom and shot back the black iron bolts, one after the other. The reports echoed through the inn.
'Quietly, fool,' Thorbad rasped. 'We don't want to wake the entire village.'
Skargrim dragged the heavy timbered door open, forcing it back on its huge hinges to let in the night. The smell was worse down here. With the four fires burnt out for the night, whatever filth was behind the smell festered.
The low keening of the moor wind masked the most obvious sounds.
It took him a moment to see the cloaked figure, and then he only saw it because the stranger detached himself from the shadows and stepped out into the village green. The moonlight caught his features, casting a silver death-mask where there should have been a face. The man turned and walked away. He moved with deceptive grace, the folds of his cloak swirling around his legs like eager lapdogs.
The figure disappeared in the direction of the temple.
The weathervane twisted in the wind, the cockerel's head spinning erratically until it came to rest, pointing east. In the distance, a lupine lament tore the night. It was a melancholy sound, filled with sadness.
'Come on, then,' Skargrim said, setting off to follow the shadowy figure through the midnight streets.

THE STRANGER PRESSED a crooked finger to his thin lips, urging silence as he led them down a narrow stone stairway.
The dwarfs followed him into a cramped chamber where a single candle burned, its low light guttering in the sudden breeze. Fitful shadows danced beneath its sway.
The cool air had a familiar, subterranean feel.
It took Skargrim a moment to realise the chamber's purpose: it was a preparation room for the dead before burial. A low wooden table, with deep scores on either side to drain blood and other bodily fluids, dominated the room. Demijohns of preservatives and pickling fluids were shelved on the far wall alongside surgical instruments and cloth bandages.
There was an inscription on the wall as well, which Kragar, who was more familiar with humans, attempted to translate. This is the place where death lives. No, that wasn't quite right. This is the house where death rejoices.
'What is this place?' Kragar whispered, staring at rows of organs floating inside glass containers. 'And who in Grungni's name are you?'
Behind the door, three small coffins were stacked one atop another.
The stranger pulled back his hood and turned to face them. 'We are beneath the Temple of Morr,' the man said. His voice was almost brittle, as though seldom used, but there was an underlying iron to it. 'I am Eustasius Meusmann, priest of the temple. This is where we prepare the dead.'
The man unclasped his cloak and laid it on top of the small coffins. He wore the austere robes of a priest beneath, but they were rumpled and stained.
'You are strangers. People are always curious about strangers, especially those as uncommon as you. I would not have our business being the gossip of the town,' the priest of Morr explained. 'This place is safe.'
'So talk,' Skargrim said, bluntly.
'Tell me, have you noticed anything strange during your short stay in Mielau?' The priest talked slowly and enunciated every word deliberately.
'Bonfires, fetishes, new shutters hammered down with holy nails?' Thorbad offered.
'Yes, yes, yes,' the man said, 'exactly. Things are there that shouldn't be. But what is not there that ought to be?'
'We saw few children,' Thorbad commented.
The priest nodded. 'There is a malady. Someone of a more superstitious bent might call it a curse, but I believe it is more plague than pariah. Milo, the headman, buries his head in the peat and refuses to do anything. It is the same every year. Same time, every year: Pflugzeit. Sickness from the marshes.'
'So?'
'Children are wasting away from a blood sickness.'
'Spit it out, priest,' Skargrim pressed.
The priest met his gaze with deathly sincerity. 'I believe there is a revenant, out there in the marshes. It comes into the village when it wakes from hibernation, needing to feed. It steals the life out of the young ones, bleeding them dry.'
'A revenant?' Kragar asked, incredulous. He looked from Skargrim to Thorbad and then back at the man. He shook his head. 'Here?'
'It sounds preposterous, believe me I know. I am an old man, and a priest at that. The children are all we have. I don't want to be putting them in the ground, wondering if there was something I could have done. Whatever it is, this sickness is striking down our children. Please, stay. Find the cause, be it mundane or supernatural. I beg you. You are our only hope.'

'WE'LL GIVE IT a day, and see what we can find,' Skargrim said when they returned to the inn. The door was open a crack, the taproom empty.
'This place is terrible, and the beer is undrinkable.'
'You don't seriously think there is a revenant hiding out in the marshes do you?'
'Not for a moment,' Skargrim said. 'But something is wrong, and I've half a mind to stick around and fix it. Like the priest said, we're their only hope.'
'You always were a vain bugger, thinking you could fix the world's woes. I say we move on.'
'This sickness, the more I think about it, the more I dislike it,' Skargrim said.
'What do you have in mind?' Thorbad asked, scratching at his scraggy beard.
'Someone was the first to fall sick, someone links all the others together. Disease spreads, it doesn't just appear from nowhere. We've got a list of names. We could visit a few of the families, see what's going on.'
'How on earth are we supposed to work out who loosed a plague?' asked Kragar. 'More to the point, why should we care?'
Thorbad looked at Skargrim and saw through his friend's vanity. 'There is evil at work here. We hunt it down and we destroy it. That is why we care.'
'But we aren't talking about some great hairy beast,' said Kragar. 'We're talking about a disease. It doesn't leave footprints in the peat for a tracker to follow.'

ELIKA FREUND WAS the first name on their list.
She was six and a half years old, and the sickness had taken its toll. Her face was hollowed out, with too little flesh draped over the bones of her head. Her eyes were warm, wet circles of pain amidst the wounded innocence of her face.
Her father, Stefan, lived alone in the shadow of the temple. His wife had died two summers earlier. He was a pig farmer, though he had given up on the animals since his daughter had fallen ill.
He led Thorbad through to the back room where Elika lay among sweat tangled bedding on her small cot.
'She has been like that for two weeks now, getting gradually worse. She used to be so vibrant, so beautiful, so full of life. Now she just lies there. She is dying, and there is nothing I can do.'
Thorbad touched the girl's brow. She was cold, too cold to be healthy. He tilted her head slightly, exposing her neck. There were no wounds around the thick vein, no bruising and no puncture marks.

'IT'S NO VAMPIRE I've ever seen.' Thorbad folded his thick arms and leaned across the stained table. 'I'll say that much.'
The taproom of the White Hart was empty save for the company of dwarfs. The barkeep, Naubhof, busied himself wiping the tankards. He stoked the fire occasionally and moved the chairs, straightening them just for the sake of straightening them. He changed the oil in the burners, and then went back to towelling out the same pitcher.
'It's nothing more than a disease. There isn't a damned thing we can do with an axe or a hammer. I say we're done here. Sooner we are gone the better.'

'WHAT DID THEY say? Anything out of the ordinary?'
Kragar shook his head. 'Nothing. Mind, they weren't exactly eager to speak about a beautiful child wasting away and the unfairness of life.'
'Same here,' Thorbad said. 'Once full of life, now she lies silently waiting to die.'
There was no link there. Happy, beautiful, full of life; those words could have described any child.
Something niggled at the back of his mind. His subconscious refused to accept that the three weren't linked. They must have overlooked something.
'You're clutching at straws,' Skargrim said to himself. Behind him, Naubhof dropped a flagon and cursed as its contents spilled across the sawdusted floorboards. The barkeep kicked it across the floor in frustration and then sank behind the bar, head in hands, and wept.
Skargrim stood, dragging back his chair, and went behind the bar.
The barkeep looked up at him through thick fingers and bloodshot eyes.
Skargrim didn't have to ask what was wrong, he knew: the little girl he had seen running through the taproom last night, Naubhof's daughter. She hadn't been down all night. He knelt beside the weeping man. He tried to talk but couldn't get a word out between the great gulping sobs. His chest heaved, his breath sucking in and out through his nose and mouth simultaneously. Skargrim didn't have to ask, but he did anyway.
Naubhof nodded, tears running down his cheeks.

NAUBHOF'S DAUGHTER LAY unmoving on her small cot. She stared, eyes wide, at some invisible spot in the distance. Skargrim touched her cheek. It was cold. There wasn't a mark on her skin. He clicked his fingers, and her head twisted round sharply at the sound. The sudden movement surprised him, but there was nothing in her eyes to suggest she had actually heard the sound, or was aware of what it was. He moved his hand to the right, towards the window, and clicked his fingers again. Again, the girl's head unconsciously jerked around in the direction of the sound. She responded similarly to any loud stimuli: coughs, claps, even a shout from Thorbad. Other than that there was nothing. It was as though someone had reached in and snuffed her light out, extracting her essence from the shell of her body.
Skargrim looked at the little girl lying helpless, fragile. There was something there, a connection in that thought, but answers continued to elude him.

'WHAT HAPPENED?' SKARGRIM asked Naubhof. The man was disconsolate. He left the tears on his cheeks, letting them run. He sat against the wall beside the dwindling fire. He seemed smaller, shrunken in his grief.
'I... she... I don't know. She just didn't wake up.'
'What did she do yesterday? Who did she see? Did she play with her friends? Visit the marshes?' Thorbad didn't give the man a chance to answer the first question before asking the fourth. 'Anything?'
The barkeep shook his head. 'Nothing. She was fine when she went to bed.'
'Could anyone, or anything, have gotten into her room when she was sleeping?'
'No,' Naubhof said, certain. 'The windows are shuttered tight. The door was barred. Nothing could get in without being let in, and Karla knows better than that. You were here all night, surely you would have heard someone breaking in. They would need an axe to get through that door.' He looked over his shoulder at the huge, thick timbered door, the door that had been ajar when they returned from their nocturnal visit with the priest of Morr.
Skargrim realised then that it was their fault. Their carelessness had let whatever it was into the inn, into that little girl's room. Now she lay there, an empty vessel, and it was because of them.
'This room is the heart of Mielau,' said Skargrim. 'At one time or another everyone comes through here. They drink, they talk, and you listen. Someone told you about the first sickness. Someone cried into their beer. You know who that was.'
'Allan Delain.' The innkeep said the name as though it physically hurt him to do so. 'It was hard for him; he lost everything in just a few months. His little girl, Saskia, died of the sickness. She was the first.' Naubhof sank back as though trying to meld with the stones of the wall. 'Thought it was consumption, myself. She was a pretty little thing, I remember, the mirror of her mother. But she never was the most robust of children, you know? Always coming down with this or that.'
'He lost everything?' Thorbad asked, lifting the black iron poker and stoking the fire, in a vain attempt to warm up the chilly room.
'His wife, Carol, died the summer before, just before the festival. A stupid accident. Then his eldest, Kristyn, hanged herself from the rafters on the eve of her wedding. Allan came home from the field and found her there. Saskia was all he had left. He worshipped that little girl. In the space of a few months his entire world ended. He used to come into the bar, night after night, not drinking, not talking, just quietly weeping. No one ever knew what to say to him.' Naubhof lapsed into silence. For a while no one spoke.
'Tell me,' Kragar asked, breaking the introspective silence, 'why do you keep your doors barred and windows shuttered at night? You don't believe it is sickness, do you? What are you afraid of?'
Naubhof looked at him through tear streaked eyes. 'Come nightfall, evil lurks on these diseased streets,' he said, with such intensity it shook them. 'Can't you feel it?'

ALLAN DELAIN LOOKED at the dwarfs, not bothering to hide his suspicion. 'What is it to you? Why do you want to know about my girls?'
'The barkeep told us about your loss. He believes Saskia was the first of the village children to die from the wasting sickness.'
'Well Naubhof should keep his fat nose out of other people's business.'
'His daughter is ill,' Skargrim said flatly.
'Oh.' Delain's foul humour dissolved in a single sound. 'I didn't know. I... how long?'
'Last night.'
'Will it never end?'
'Tell us what happened. What do you remember of Saskia's illness?'
'There is nothing to tell.' Delain sniffed, stifling bitter memories as they threatened to overwhelm him. 'She took her sister's death hard. She idolised Kristyn, but what eleven-year-old doesn't worship her big sister? She stopped going out with her friends. It was as if she had forgotten how to play. She only sat up in her room, clutching a wretched rag doll that used to be Kristyn's. She wouldn't eat properly. She wasted away before my eyes and there was nothing I could do. I wasn't enough to fill the space for her.'
Skargrim ignored the man's pain. 'Was she a beautiful child?'
Allan Delain laughed bitterly. 'Doesn't every father think his daughter is the most beautiful child in the world? Yes she was beautiful. She was the jewel of the village.'
Skargrim nodded. Apparently as an afterthought, he asked, 'One last thing, if you would, Naubhof said your eldest daughter was to be married. Who to?'
'Iago Kaufmann.'
'Ah. And where would we find this Kaufmann?'
'He lives outside the village now, in a tower within the marshes. He's a peculiar sort, but then, show me a mage that isn't a little odd. He keeps himself very much to himself, has done since, well, you know...'

'WHAT ARE YOU thinking?' Thorbad asked.
Skargrim teased at his beard, tugging one of the steel-grey strands from his chin. He scowled down at it. 'We need to talk to Kaufmann. There might be measures he can take to contain the illness while we root out the cause.'
'A restless spirit of some kind?' Kragar asked.
Skargrim nodded. 'We left the door open last night and something got in and drained the life out of the barkeep's daughter. It's our fault, so we must make it right. There is something evil out there in the night, and we're going to kill it.'
'Well, there's one way to know for sure,' Thorbad said.
'Dig her up,' Kragar agreed.

'THE MAGE DOESN'T exactly encourage visitors,' Kragar said, his leg sinking knee-deep into the sodden ground. He shuddered, his face twisting with revulsion, and jerked back instinctively. Skargrim had to catch him by the shoulder to stop him from pitching into the bog.
The wind was rising. Mielau was a curious construction; the village straddled the border between the solid ground of the moors and the bog of the marsh. A mile to the east the ground turned treacherous, every successive step more unsure than the last. The grasses grew taller, reaching up to Skargrim and Kragar's waists, lush green. Bulrushes popped up in patches where the ground was saturated, but the path to Kaufmann's tower was by no means that obvious, even to the ranger. As the grasses grew taller the waters deepened, and the dwarfs' dislike for their journey grew.
It was a bleak, hostile environment. A poisonous sun set redly on the horizon. Curls of mist rose up from the marsh, conjuring wraiths to patrol the long grasses. Despite the isolation there was no quiet; insects chirped and buzzed incessantly.
Skargrim, being a ranger, was more sure-footed than the others. Kragar was reduced to using a crooked branch as a staff to feel out firm ground. Masked beneath the rushes and the tall grass was a makeshift causeway of banked up earth. It was tortuously slow going, feeling out each step with the foot of the branch, the branch sinking into marsh water more often than not. Tangles of thorny brambles meshed with the gorse and reed, giving the marshes bite.
Skargrim pushed them aside, opening the way.
'This is an accursed place,' Kragar muttered, stumbling again. Skargrim made a grab for his collar. It became more and more difficult to follow the twists of the hidden path the lower the sun sank.
Skargrim scanned the horizon for signs of the wizard's tower. 'Who in their right mind would choose to live out here?'
Beside him Kragar cried out and pointed down the bank. Tied among the rushes was a crude raft of logs lashed together with leather ties, and a long punting pole. He clambered up onto the raft and sank the pole into the mud, using his weight to ease it forward.
Skargrim splashed through the shallow marsh waters behind him, cursing with every step. Kragar helped him struggle onto the raft. He was muttering dark curses under his breath.
Twenty feet on the marsh was almost as deep as they were tall. Noxious aromas wafted up from beneath the waterline every time the pole sank in.
Mielau disappeared behind them. With the sun all but spent, they saw the skeletal finger of the wizard's tower rising out of the tall grasses, accusing the sky.
The dwarfs brought the raft as near the tower as they could. Creepers and climbing plants rose out of the marsh to reclaim the decrepit structure, their tendrils opening cracks in the stones. Part of the conical roof had collapsed, exposing rotten beams and broken slate.
'Even harder to believe anyone lives here,' Kragar said.
Skargrim imagined the wind carrying with it the lamenting voices of all the children who had ever succumbed to the sickness, laying their pain at the wizard's door. The thought wormed its way deep inside the dwarf's skin and wrapped itself around his heart. He felt eyes watching them as they walked up to the iron banded door. A single amethyst was set in the keystone of the arch. Rose thorns twined around each other on either side of the door, the flowers long since wilted.
There were footprints in the wet grass, heel and toe showing clearly. Skargrim knelt, studying the indentations. They were too small to be the prints of a fully grown man, too delicate, the impression too subtle. A woman, maybe, or a girl child. He dusted the residue of marsh soil from his fingers and banged on the door with a clenched fist.

IAGO KAUFMANN OPENED the door, his brow creased in an unwelcoming scowl at the intrusion on his solitude. 'What?'
Skargrim knew the man, even without his briarwood pipe. The shaved head and hourglass tattoo were not features likely to be forgotten. The mage had been dozing the last time they had seen him, hunched against the fireplace in the White Hart.
'We want to talk to you, wizard.'
'I have nothing to say.'
Skargrim put his foot in the way of the closing door. 'There are children sick and dying, wizard. Are a few moments of your isolation that precious?'
Kaufmann sighed, 'Yes, yes, yes, it is a great tragedy, but I don't see what it has to do with me. They don't meddle in my life, and in turn I don't meddle in theirs.'
'Perhaps you should, wizard,' Kragar said, 'Just a few questions, and then we'll gladly leave you to your miserable existence.'
'Oh, for pity's sake, come in then and ask your damned questions.'
Kaufmann ushered them into the chaos that was his home. The first thing Skargrim noticed was the smell: the dank, fungal smell of something rotten, an astringent reek not dissimilar to the stench on the night wind. The second thing he noticed was the mess. Kaufmann's home was more akin to a jackdaw's nest than a grown man's home. Amid the clutter he saw the makings of several gewgaws, much like the ones hanging from the homes of Mielau. Skargrim could imagine the mage walking the diseased streets after nightfall, stringing up fetishes and charms to ward off the sickness.
For all his protestations, it seemed Kaufmann did care.
There was a rumpled cot in the corner, surrounded by shelves of books, sheaves of vellum, and pots of ink, ink that stained the pitted work surface of the room's only table. Beakers and phials filled with curiously coloured liquids steamed, bubbled and fizzed beside embalming fluid, coffin nails and vials of viscous red liquid. And, curiously, there were mirrors: hand mirrors, gilded full-bodied mirrors and silvered mirrors. A pile of white bones in the corner caught his eye: a human ribcage laid bare.
'So, dwarfs, ask.'
'We believe that the sickness afflicting the village originated from the house of Herr Delain.'
'That is not a question, dwarf. That is a statement.' Kaufmann reached for his briarwood pipe.
There was an old panelled door between the two largest mirrors, held shut by a thick rusty chain. Skargrim reasoned that it led to the collapsed second storey of the crumbling tower. There was a second door, a trap set into the floor, built into the ancient stonework but burnished and apparently new. It was secured with a wooden brace.
'Did you know Saskia Delain?'
'Of course I knew her, I was betrothed to her sister,' Kaufmann said. 'She was a beautiful child. Such a waste.'
'That word again,' Kragar said to Skargrim. 'Was her sister beautiful?'
'What are you prattling on about, dwarf? What can it possibly matter if Kristyn was a troll or a swan?'
'Was Kristyn beautiful?'
'Not in the classical sense,' Kaufmann replied, 'but she was beautiful to me.'
Skargrim looked over the mage's shoulder at the huge silvered mirror on the far wall and at their reflected selves captured within it.
Kaufmann looked down at his hands. 'Kristyn came to me, a week before we were to be married and asked for my help, for a seance. She wanted me to use my skills to reach her mother. She was insistent, and I was a fool in love.'
'Why was she so desperate to contact her mother?'
'She was having nightmares. She wouldn't tell me what they were about, not at first, but then she shared. I wished she hadn't.' The wizard fidgeted with the stem of his unlit pipe. 'They were dreams of when she was young. She needed to know if they were true or not. Her father refused to tell her.'
'So you helped her?'
'I wish to all the gods I hadn't, believe me. No one could have lived with what she learned. Whichever way you choose to look at it, I killed her. I was responsible.' Kaufmann sank down onto a tatty chair, the upholstery split and spilling stuffing. He fumbled the pipe, dropping it on the floor at his feet. Salt tears stained his wan cheeks. 'She was a twin. Her sister was smothered on their third birthday. Kristyn killed her own sister, dwarf. That was her dream. Over and over, every night, she dreamed of suffocating the life out of a child she thought was herself. It has nothing to do with the sickness taking these poor children; it was Kristyn's personal shame. Now, please, I beg you, let her shame stay dead with her. She deserves that little dignity, surely?'
'She isn't at rest, mage, and you know it. I can tell by looking around your chamber, at your face. She has become a restless spirit, a revenant shade. Forget what she was, she is now a thing of evil and must be sent screaming back to the underworld. Redeem yourself, wizard. This has to end, for the sake of all the children curled up in their beds tonight.'

THORBAD STOOD KNEE deep in Kristyn Delain's grave.
He had come prepared to burn her bones and release her vengeful spirit, once and for all laying to rest the evil that had invaded the quiet hamlet of Mielau.
'I remember the funeral rites. It's as if it happened yesterday,' Meusmann, the priest of Morr, said. 'Such a tragedy, a young girl taking her own life. Her father was beside himself, so soon after losing his wife.'
Wiping the sweat from his brow, the runepriest asked, 'What about Kaufmann?'
'Grief comes to some later than others. He was silent. Refused the comfort of others. He paid his last respects and went home to his solitude. I doubt he even believed it had happened.'
A small stone, beneath a weeping willow tree, bore her name. The grass around the grave had yellowed and died.
Thorbad drove the shovel into the hard earth, forcing it deep with all of his weight. The pile of black earth rose beside him. Again and again the shovel bit into the soil, until it finally hit something harder. He dropped down onto his hands and knees and began clearing the dirt away from the coffin lid.
The twin moons of Morrslieb and Mannsleib were in ascendancy long before they cracked open the lid on Kristyn Delain's empty coffin.
There was nothing to burn. There would be no easy release from the scourge they faced.

'YOU BURY THE boy tomorrow?'
'At first light,' the priest said, frightened by the look of grim determination on Thorbad's face.
'Last light would be better. We could use the corpse to lure out the dead. The creature obviously needs to feed, so we put temptation in its way.'
'That is wrong, dwarf. The boy deserves peace. I will not sanction the violation of the ceremony.'
'You asked for our help, priest. We bury the boy at dusk.'

'WE HAVE AN empty grave, a great love lost to suicide, and a mad wizard: all the makings of a classic Tilean tragedy,' Kragar said. 'We also have our cause, but we don't have the slightest clue exactly what that cause is. An empty grave smacks of a bloodsucker, but there were no bite marks on any of the young ones. And what's with all of those damned mirrors?'
'Beauty,' said Skargrim. 'Vanity. What else is a mirror for? She lived in his tower, preening and posing before those huge mirrors. The only reason they haven't been destroyed is because they remind the idiot mage of his lost love. His bed was turned towards the largest. Maybe he dreams he can see her reflected in their silver.'
'So what are we going to do?'
'The priest was right, at least in part,' Thorbad said. 'This is no natural sickness. Find the Delain woman and we find the cause. Rid the world of her accursed presence, and we wipe out the disease.'
'Tonight,' Skargrim nodded, 'we'll find the girl and put her out of our misery.'

SHE WAS NO longer a thing of beauty.
She was no longer anything. But she remembered. She remembered her love for him. She remembered her mother's hand, her sister's face. She hungered.
She had promised to stay in the marshes.
She remembered their screams, new and old. She remembered the sudden blossoming of vitality inside her body, the blush of youth, the strength, the living. She remembered death, and she craved it. The more she fed, the more her failing flesh needed it.
She remembered her reflection in the glass, the anger at seeing her flesh decaying, her beauty eroding. And she surrendered to the hunger inside, the need to consume the very essence of all things beautiful: children captivated by all that the world had to offer.
She did not remember how she came to be damned to this unlife. She did not remember the hand that fashioned her doom.
But she remembered why. 'He loved me,' she told the abomination in the glass.
She opened her mouth, sharing the screams of the souls she had consumed with the night, savouring their innocence even as it surrendered to the maelstrom of her corrupt flesh.
She called the dead children to her, and they answered her call.

THEY HEARD THE cry as they stepped out into the darkness. It was both more and less than human.
'I've got no liking for this,' Kragar muttered. 'Even the air tastes wrong.'
Thunder echoed across the sky, a single rumbling call before the first fat drops of rain hit their faces. Within a minute it was torrential, the driving rain transforming the hard-packed earth to mud.
'Do you think the wizard will keep his end of the bargain? We are about to slay his true love.'
'Kaufmann is of the Amethyst Order, dwarf,' Eustasius Meusmann explained. 'None understand the transience of life better than the magisters of the purple wind. They touch the essence of death with their work but do not follow the path of shadows. It is their sacred duty to undo all the works of necromancy. He will come when he is called, have faith.'
Karla, the barkeep's daughter appeared around the street corner, directly across from their hiding place. Her face was empty, her eyes hungry. She moved with a curious shuffling gait, struggling to put one foot in front of the other.
A low moan escaped her lips, answering the cry of a moment before. The same call echoed like thunder across the small hamlet, twenty, thirty voices or more joining until the chorus filled the night.
'Is she...?'
'Dead? She always was,' Thorbad said. 'That is no longer a human child, only a shell for a thing of evil.'
Karla wasn't alone. More children shuffled barefoot through the muddy streets, their deathly procession ringing the Garden of Morr.
The priest had buried young Gren that evening. His corpse was still fresh.
'They are not children,' Thorbad stressed, pitching his voice above the ceaseless drum of the rain. 'They can't be allowed to live on after we dispose of the woman.'
'But look at them,' Meusmann said. 'How can we just-'
'The innocent souls they were are gone, priest.' Another howl split the night, the mother calling to her children. 'I have no liking for this.'
'Good,' Thorbad said, 'let it stain your dreams and haunt you into madness. Just remember, what we do is salvation, not damnation, however vile it feels. We kill because we have to. We do not enjoy it.'
Skargrim and Kragar nodded.
Together they followed the girl through the storm and into the Garden of Morr. It was no longer a place of peace.
The woman stood over the freshly turned grave. She was dressed in the rotten white of her burial gown, her raven-black hair streaked with dried peat and rain. Her skin was mottled and grey, her lips utterly without blood. Rot ate away at the softer parts of her flesh, leaving behind ragged hollows of bone and sinew.
A bell tolled in the spring night.
The noise drew her gaze. She turned and turned again. She saw the children flocking towards her with open arms and hungry faces, and beyond them, the dwarfs: Thorbad and Kragar clutching their hammers, Skargrim with his huge double-headed axe, and the priest.
Thorbad entered the heart of the garden side by side with the priest of Morr. He turned the hammer over and over in his huge hands and planted it in the soft ground no more than ten paces from the wild eyed dead girl and her sick children. His fingers caressed the lines of the rune carved into the weapon's head, releasing the magic held within it. The air crackled blue around the hammer, and then erupted into flame. The rain singed into steam around it.
Thorbad hurled the weapon end over end through the air, not at the woman in her burial rags, but at a mark carved into the weeping willow fifteen paces to her left. The hammer thundered into the trunk. All around the Garden of Morr the runepriest's carefully concealed sigils roared into life, triggered by the breaking of that first rune.
The thing that had been Kristyn Delain gathered up the trailing hem of her rotten skirts and charged at the dwarf, vile fury contorting her already ghastly face.
Thorbad raised his fist above his head, watching. He waited until she was two steps from him, claws out to rake his face, and then he brought his fist down.
The dead woman froze, trapped within the binding Thorbad had laid into the grass. The grey skin of her lips peeled back to expose the decay beneath.
'Quickly, the binding is weak!' Thorbad yelled into the storm.
Meusmann stepped forward, monstrous in the moonlight. A hammer and a pouch of silver nails hung beside a silver dagger on his belt. He splashed anointed water in the face of the dead woman and seared her mottled skin before uttering the first words of purification. The shade raged within the confines of the binding. She bucked and writhed, fighting the grip of the rune. The binding would fail, that was its nature. Meusmann fumbled the knife, dropping it in the dirt. The dead girl cackled her delight. It was the first sound she had made since Thorbad had triggered the runes. The power of the enchantment was failing.
The sky flashed silver with lightning.
Meusmann splashed the water again into her leering face. It scorched where it connected, searing through the skin and into the dead flesh beneath.
Words tumbled out of the priest's mouth, his tongue tripping over the contortions of the invocation, his voice rising to be heard above the crash and boom of the thunder and rain.
'Out beast! Be gone!'
Instead of collapsing, the shade's head twisted completely around to stare at her children. A smile spread slowly across the ruin of her face. 'Kill them, my little ones!'
And the children surged forward, tiny hands gnarled and twisted by sickness into talons. Their movements were awkward, slow and disjointed. They shuffled towards Meusmann and Thorbad, arms extended, moaning their sickening wail as they closed in on the living, teeth bared, hungry to rend flesh from bone, and feast.
'Kaufmann! Now!' The Runepriest bellowed.
There was no sign of the mage.

* * *

SKARGRIM CHARGED, HURLING himself at a small, stumbling corpse and burying his axe deep in the boy's skull. It crumbled beneath the blow. Skargrim yanked the axe-head free in a spray of blood and brain.
Meusmann stared in mute horror at the killing, unable to see anything but a child in the pouring rain.
Skargrim roared his anger as three more corpses clawed at him. Five more pressed in behind them. There wasn't enough room to swing the huge axe, so he butted the handle into the jaws and temples of the relentless dead. Any doubts Skargrim might have harboured were brutally vanquished, as rotten fingers worn down to jagged bone spars tore through his cheek, down his chin and into his neck.
He fell to his knees, borne down by the sheer mass of bodies.
Skargrim's fall snapped Meusmann out of his paralysis. He screamed, brandishing the silver hammer above his head and hurling himself into the fray. Before his first blow had landed squarely he felt his grip on the weapon fail as the shaft crumbled in his hands and blew away, dust on the storm. The remnants of the hammer's head snapped the neck of a monstrous girl. She didn't fall. She reached out for him, clawing at his face.
Meusmann turned to flee even as Kragar launched himself at the dead girl, smashing a powerful fist into her head.

THE SPELL BINDING Kristyn Delain's shell snapped and she was on them in a banshee fury.
Thorbad reacted first, lunging for the silver dagger the priest of Morr had dropped. He came up with it clenched in his fist and slammed it into the dead girl's chest, between the third and fourth ribs, deep into her rotten heart.
He thrust it in again and again, driving her back step by step. Her flesh buckled beneath the savagery of each silver blow. There was no blood, no screams.
Thorbad drove the dagger into her stomach, spilling her guts, opening her throat and giving her a second mouth. Still she did not scream.
The insidious righteousness of the blessed blade finally poisoned her dead flesh. With the silver dagger protruding from her raw breast, she fell back into the shallow pit of her own open grave.
Thorbad took the hammer and nails the priest had dropped and leapt into the wound in the earth. He drove the first silver nail into her skull, the second through her right eye, the third through her left. Her screams were terrible to hear.
The fourth pierced her tongue and jaw. He drove a fifth through her left wrist, deep into the wood of the coffin, and a sixth through her right. He hammered two through her open stomach. She fought him, desperately trying to be free. He shattered her ankles and pinned them to the base of the coffin.
The final nail was not a nail at all, but a huge silver spike, which he held over her ruptured heart. She stared at him through ruined eyes as he drove the spike through her chest and into the earth beneath. Two feet of metal protruded from the wound. All around it, the vile revenant spirit leaked out through the ragged hole and into the aethyr. The last vapours of unlife seeped out of her ruined lips, like ghostly giggles and the delights of children playing.
Beneath the sounds of joy were the faint screams of fear. And then there was only the sound of the rain.
She was gone.
Wiping the gore from his face, Thorbad soaked the dead girl's corpse in oil before he clambered back out of the funeral pit.

MEUSMANN WATCHED THE dwarf walk to the weeping willow where his hammer lay. He felt sick. There was nothing heroic in what they had done. For all the monstrosity that she had become, she had been a young woman once, troubled by death and guilt. This fate was not the one she deserved. He prayed that her soul would find peace.
Skargrim and Kragar stood among the small corpses. Meusmann wanted to believe the raindrops were tears streaking down their haggard faces, but he knew they weren't. A tongue of lightning split the sky, branding the harrowing sight of the garden on his mind's eye now and forever. There was nothing clean about this, nothing righteous.
Then he heard the scream and saw the shape come shrieking out of the shadows at him.
Even in his madness, Iago Kaufmann's power was awesome. His hands crackled with the deep purple veins of raw magical energy as he levelled them at the priest. Streamers of blistering force arced out from his fingers and slammed into Meusmann's chest, hurling him from his feet. The priest lay in a whorish sprawl, wreaths of steam rising up from his body. He twitched, his mind fighting for control of the muscles that no longer obeyed it.
Kaufmann stood over him, lips tight, the words of an incantation ready to spill out and end the priest's miserable existence.

'IT'S OVER, WIZARD,' Thorbad said. 'She's gone. You can't bring her back.' He didn't need to shout for his voice to carry. He stood between the open grave and the two men, hammer in hand, his finger tracing the outline of the fire rune carved into its head.
The hammer ignited in his hands, the hammer head consumed by bright blue flame. 'This time she stays dead.'
Thorbad threw the weapon into the grave.
The minutiae of the garden were locked in time for a moment, the fat rain frozen in the air, and the scream trapped on Iago Kaufmann's slack face. Then a low crump brought the world snapping back. Flames leapt out of the grave as the cleansing fire consumed all that remained of the mage's lost lover.
Kaufmann surged upwards, the priest forgotten. His scream was primal, full of rage, despair, guilt, failure, and, ultimately, agony. He stood over the grave, the rising flames contorting his face, conjuring elementals to reshape his pain. No words could voice his desperation, his need for love and absolution, or the depths of his guilt.
Kaufmann met Thorbad's gaze. He stepped forward, soundlessly falling into the fires of the grave.
The dwarf looked down into the flames. The wizard had impaled himself on the silver spike. His arms cradled the woman he had loved in life, and in death, forever joined. The angry fire fused their flesh into one form, before consuming them utterly.
Beside him, the priest struggled to stand. Thorbad reached out a hand to help him. Tears and rain mingled on the priest's ashen face.
Thorbad looked back at Skargrim and Kragar, death all around them. 'We should have seen it. We should have known. The fool turned his back on his beliefs because of some misguided love, and sacrificed his sanity to bring her back. The mirrors in his tower were hers. The chains on the doors kept her locked up. They were all part of the same thing. Even the ribcage on the floor was used for binding her soul. But as her flesh failed and decay set in, his hold on her weakened, if he had ever truly been in control. So she came into the village, drawn by the vitality of the children, leeching the life out of them to renew her beauty. The more she fed, the more she needed to feed. The stench in the air at night was her children on the prowl, their rotten corpses reeking. Beauty: the ultimate lie of the flesh. It made monsters of them all.'