*
Niam turned his nose as soon as the death scent hit him. Before the captain and his men could rush in, he quickly stepped between the soldiers and the door with two upraised hands. “Wait.”
“For love of the Creator, move out of the way and let them do their job, Maldies!” Lord Joachim barked.
Niam’ shook his head. “Sorry sir, but I think I might still have a job I need to do here.” Perhaps it was Niam’s sudden polite turn, but Joachim nodded to the troops, and they stepped back a pace. “This better be good, Maldies,” the count growled.
Niam held his breath and prepared himself. Even before inhaling the putrid air, the smell found its way into his nose. The worst part was that when he finally took a breath, he tasted it as well. Niam placed his arm over his nose, hoping that would help somehow. Behind him someone retched. Around him, furniture and paintings were strewn in fragments across the manor’s expansive entrance. Red light from the stained glass windows lent the surroundings the crimson cast of a charnel house.
Here the ordinary rules of the normal world had become overturned. Niam actually half expected that if he tossed an object up into the air it would keep traveling until it came to rest on the ceiling. A residual hate that reviled the world Niam had been born into hung in the air with the stench.
“There’s something bad in this house. I don’t think it was Kreeth that did this,” he shuddered, indicating the completely ransacked condition of the room. “This started as we were trying to leave.”
“Be careful,” Jolan Kine called out to everyone.
Suddenly, a man on the landing above screamed. Everyone’s eyes shot upward in time to see a well-dressed figure with a rope wound around his neck leap across the railing and plummet halfway down. The rope snapped taut and the force of the man’s momentum stopping so abruptly caused his body to jerk and spasm rudely. The man’s face bulged and his tongue lolled like a fat sausage link.
A soldier jerked backward so quickly that he lost his footing and fell, dropping his sword as he went down. Niam watched as the man who had just hanged himself disappeared slowly, fading until only empty air remained.
“Ghost,” Joachim told everyone. “And an unusually vivid one.”
The soldier who fell muttered a silent prayer as he got up, looking pale and shaken. “It’s alright,” Joachim told him. He handed the soldier his sword and said levelly, “No matter what you see, keep this in your hands.” The man nodded his head nervously. “At least it wasn’t a revenant,” Joachim told Kine.
“A revenant, sir?” the shock in the captain’s voice was clear.
“Seen worse,” Joachim told the man. “And you may too before the day is out.”
Jolan Kine limped deliberately to the space beneath the balcony where the apparition had plunged and addressed the soldiers. “You were briefed, were you not?”
All three men nodded their heads. “Yes sir.”
“Good. Then remember what you were told and remember your training. It’s not ghosts that are going to hurt you. It’s lack of attention that will do it every time.”
“Yes sir!” the men called out in unison.
“The basement is probably the room you want to see first,” Niam said. Joachim nodded his head and barked out orders to guard the stairway.
“Lead the way,” Kine said, wincing as he followed Niam down the hall.
As they made their way cautiously toward the room with the secret entrance, Niam noted that the horrible odor seemed to be lessening. “That means the source is behind us,” Joachim declared darkly.
As soon as Niam and the Wizard’s Hammer entered the storage room, they both stopped abruptly. An intense spasm of pain seized Niam. Arrows of fire shot straight into his skull behind his eyes. Niam’s legs lost all their strength and he gasped as he fell. He had no idea who grabbed him and pulled him out of the room, but the moment he was across the threshold, the pain left him.
Niam took in a shaky breath. Jolan Kine stood above him, looking unruffled except for the pain in his hip. “That didn’t hurt you?” Niam asked, stunned that the man remained upright.
The Hammer reminded him, “I’m immune to the worst effects of sorcery.”
“Must be nice,” croaked Niam. “Must be a major spell working beyond that door. I’ve never felt anything as strong as this before.”
“Then we need more men,” Kine said. “And I have to have more time to heal. At least we know this much.”
“I thought you could just waltz right in there,” Niam said, agitated.
“Maybe,” the Hammer replied. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other nasty surprises waiting,” he said.
“Why would he do that?” Niam asked, incredulous.
Kine said, “My guess would be to leave anyone trying to get past the door disoriented and weakened before facing what’s on the other side.”
“Well, what now?” Joachim demanded.
“We find out what happened to the staff.”
Niam made a disgusted sound, and Kine looked his way. “If I go in there and Kreeth has set a trap that causes a large rock to fall on my head, I’ll be just as dead as anyone else. Just because I’m immune to his sorcery doesn’t mean I’m immortal. Remember, the assassin’s arrow? The only reason Jort is dead is that he made some kind of mistake. I don’t know about you, but I plan on living a bit longer.”
Niam looked away, feeling anger rise. “Fine,” he said, feeling cheated. He knew this was just a fact-finding trip. Nearly every time he thought he was about to close in on his brother and sister’s killer, something stood in his way. Niam pushed his way past the soldiers and then Davin and Maerillus.
“Wait Niam!” Davin called out angrily.
“That’s all I ever do is wait!” Niam snapped back and continued down the hallway toward the stairs. He knew what he was about to see. He had smelled rotting bodies before—at the Vandin camp. In the end, it was all the same wasn’t it? Death was death. Niam knew that whatever presence dwelt within the house was now bound up in the basement. All that waited above them were the corpses. And if he couldn’t get at Kreeth, he knew he could get a good look at what Kreeth had done, and feed that to his anger and hatred.
“Niam!” Joachim’s booming voice didn’t scare him right then.
Whatever threats the count could make were nothing compared to this. Niam walked into the manor’s grand foyer. Voices imprisoned within the old manse whispered all around him. Men, women, and children condemned to live and die here wept, cursed, and wailed in remnants of terrible events, damned to remain there as a shroud of the manor’s evil presence.
Niam prayed that the Creator was kind and merciful. He certainly hadn’t been so with this place. All of the priests and monks he had ever heard claimed that love was the force that propelled creation. Yet the source of the Voice repeatedly visited him with the most horrible visions and dreams. Only something beyond the normal, waking world of men could know what it had shown Niam. No love there. Just torture.
Was the source of the Voice closer to the creator than men and women?
Something had been there when his bother and sister died, yet it had done nothing. Where was the love and mercy in that? Niam marched into the grand foyer, and he made a beeline for the arched stairway. A small, calm, and quiet part of him whispered that he was being irrational. Yet, what of it? Life was like a continual series of irrational actions, like jumping off of cliffs. Problem was, Niam rarely knew what the end result of his actions were going to be until he was already in the air. So he continued walking, now up the stairs, despite calls from the people behind him. The stench grew steadily, and the anger within Niam’s chest grew with it.
He was in midair.
If anyone came into this mansion trying to fool himself that the stench in the air came from anything other than a rotting man or woman, he was deluding himself.
That was the smell of the Voice’s love.
In his mind’s eye, Niam saw Kreeth’s victims, starting with Sarah floating on her back in Siler’s Lake, and Seth, whose bones along the choked shore of Siler’s Lake was a flawless testimony to the sorcerer’s evil for over a year. In here, the images were mere extensions of the voices droning around him.
Niam struggled to shut all of that out. At the top of the stairs he almost stopped. The stench was ferocious. A door lay open. He instinctively knew it had been done to leave a message—a gift—an invitation to look, to peep around the door and find the surprise waiting on the other side. Niam realized this because the man’s personality remained within the manor as an after-effect of the sorcery’s taint. Nobody else could know that. Niam doubted they would understand what he himself had no words for. His imagination turned as he prepared himself for the sight of the bodies. He already pictured them, lined up where Kreeth had executed them, eyes open and blank.
Finally, he arrived at the open door and walked boldly through it. He knew he could handle it. The charred bodies covered with teeming mats of ravens had proved that, hadn’t it? Niam walked a few paces into a wall of sickness and death so thick he could have swam in it. And when he looked around, he realized his folly. What he saw there was a vision beyond his worst nightmare.